The OLED Monitor You’ve Been Waiting For: LG 27GR95QE

LG provided the monitor for this review but they don't get any import on the editorial direction of this video now I don't think this monitor needs much of an introduction it's the first 27 inch gaming monitor that has an OLED panel it's safe to say that I'm pretty excited about this review because apart from the OLED panel this actually is a classic 27 inch 1440p gaming monitor with a 240Hz refresh rate and personally I'm a big fan of this class of monitors anyway hold it so as you'd expect the black level is perfect it's honestly kind of an unreal experience when turned on this monitor for the first time like if you have a wallpaper that has black in it and switch to this OLED monitor it just looks so much more crisp than on a regular LCD display but this monitor is a bit different than your typical OLED TV like here it's smaller but it also has a different coding all the TVs are typically glossy but here we're getting a matte coating very similar to what you find on a regular IPS or VA panel and I really don't want to discuss this in too much detail but Matt as well as glossy panels have their own pros and cons I find magic to be a pretty reasonable choice for a monitor especially for a monitor that doesn't get very bright more on that in a bit but yeah at the same time I'd love to see what this monitor would look like with a glossy finish I really hope that we're gonna see a glossy version pop up in the near future for now though I really don't mind the matte coding as it's pretty smooth and honestly it doesn't really take away from the fact that blacks look amazing on this monitor of course less so when you're using it in a bright room but bright lights and Reflections don't really go well with all kinds of Coatings so either way you want to control the ambient light with any kind of coating for the best experience generally this monitor is not very well suited for bright rooms at Max you can squeeze out roughly 250 nits out of this panel at least with a small tweak I'm going to show you in a bit 200 to 250 minutes Peak brightness are perfectly fine if you can block off sunlight and more than enough if you're using this monitor at night though when the sun is bursting through your window you're not gonna be happy with the max brightness LG probably have chosen the max brightness pretty conservatively to mitigate the issue of burn-in and as this monitor just hit the market we don't really know yet how much of an issue burning actually is with this monitor so if you want to be on the safe side you probably don't want to use the settings I'm about to show you next first up I'm going to turn off the smart energy saving option the default setting is high which makes things like websites and dark mode look a bit too dark sometimes and kind of hard to read it's a bit inconsistent and really not a setting I recommend using unless you're super concerned about saving energy Now by changing the contrast from 60 to 70 you can actually gain about 50 Nets of peak brightness 70 is the actual clipping point of white so you won't get anything by going higher than this interestingly enough the setting seems to trigger some kind of safety feature I guess because with a contrast at 70 the monitor will slightly dim down full screen white not something you will encounter all the time as something like a dark menu bar is enough that the monitor doesn't dim but kind of interesting nevertheless so here's the complete overview of the settings that I recommend using in case you don't have access to a Colorimeter I'd also recommend using the SSC profile that I made in conjunction with these settings download link in the video description if you're concerned about potential burn-in I'd suggest leaving the contrast at 60 if that's bright enough for you anyway an HDR mode we're getting a far higher Peak brightness of about 670 nits but only when small parts of the screen need to be bright full screen white is kept at 141 nits which isn't very impressive to say the least despite that HDR still looks amazing especially dark scenes like here where the background is completely black the OLED Tech really flexes its muscles and makes colors pop against the background this isn't the type of HDR though that makes you want to wear like sunglasses when there's a sunny beach scene or something like that that really would need a High full screen brightness it's more like the type of HDR you're going to be enjoying in a dimmed room and be impressed by the shadow detail and with how clear bright highlights look and dark scenes when it comes to HDR accuracy a Jeep did a decent job the eotf tracking is basically on point which is great to see though the grayska performance isn't amazing and I'm not a big fan of the lock RGB controls and that we basically can't make any color related adjustments in the OSD menu in HDR mode now for gaming I really enjoy this monitor I mean you'd already expect Crazy Fast Response times from OLED but this one has double the refresh rate of our good old OLED TVs which is pretty nice as you can see there's a pretty substantial difference and motion Clarity between 120 and 240 hertz now let's take a closer look at the response times performance unlike with a regular LCD display there are no overdraft mods to choose from which is kind of interesting but I really don't mind it because this is what the only mode looks like safe to say that this is an excellent result even with this very strict testing methodology this is a legit one millisecond response time monitor interestingly enough though there is overshoot as indicated by the orange fields on the right though despite that almost the hotel is orange this really is very minimal overshoot and not actually something you're gonna notice in game also what I find very interesting is that the overshoot on this OLED monitor is a bit different than on a regular ACD monitor like as we can see here with the transition from RGB 0 to RGB 153 this right here is the overshoot and after 4.2 milliseconds it faints instantly and and reaches the target value which is kind of odd and quite different from how LCDs behave 4.2 milliseconds is exactly the time and takes a 240Hz panel to refresh so the overshoot lasts for exactly a single refresh cycle now as you can imagine this holds a few implications for lower refresh rates and yeah as you would expect the overshoot becomes more noticeable the lower the refresh rate gets at 240 hertz there's really no visible overshoot and down to 144hz the image still looks pretty clean but at 120 hertz and below the inverse ghosting starts getting a bit too much not like it's unusable or distracting in game but it's truly not optimal for a 240Hz monitor this isn't really a huge concern in my opinion especially as the 240Hz performance is so good so how does it compare to our good old LCD monitors well these are a few of the fastest monitors I've tested so far and I have to say that the energy Outlet beats them all it even looks clearer than the 390 Hertz IPS monitor from Acer or The Omen x25 which has a very fast 240Hz TN panel and in case you're curious this is how the response times compare and yeah the OLED is a good bit faster than the 240Hz Omen x25 which previously was the fastest monitor I've ever measured really the only way these LCDs can rival the oleds Motion Performance is with the help of backlight strobbing I'd love to see how the outlet would stack up with black frame insertion which is the OLED equivalent of backlight's drawing but unfortunately LG didn't Implement such a feature but this doesn't change the fact that this is an insanely good monitor for Competitive Gaming however you might be very disappointed when you boot up certain games for the first time because with some games including valorent and a few others this monitor straight up refuses to run at 240 Hertz instead it'll run at 120 hertz in downscaled UHD a quick and dirty fix is using the windowed full screen mode this will make the monitor run at 240 hertz but comes with the typical drawbacks of not using the actual full screen mode to actually solve this issue you gotta use the custom resolution utility by toasty x with this program you can delete the so-called TV resolutions exposed by the monitor which are responsible for this issue this is pretty straightforward but I'll leave a link to a Reddit post that describes this in a bit more detail down below after you've done this and restarted your drivers the monitor will default to 240Hz 1440b as you would expect now I've contacted LG about this issue and it told me that this is caused by the Nvidia driver and Nvidia are working on an update to resolve this issue so I wonder if that's a problem with AMD gpus as well so please leave a comment down below if you're using this monitor with an AMD graphics card no of course I'm not happy to see issues like this but I'm willing to give LG the benefit of the doubt here for now as it might actually be nvidia's thought anyway after quickly fixing this with Cru I have to say that I really enjoy this monitor for games like valorent competitive Gamers will also be happy to hear that the display lag is pretty low technically 0.7 milliseconds of processing lag is a bit on a higher side but realistically that's not something that's noticeable especially as the total display lag is just 2.8 milliseconds which is pretty fast and it's the same with and without adaptive sync now to say that I'm not 100 happy with the Adaptive sync performance this monitor is certified by Nvidia as g-sync compatible which usually indicates that the g-sync or adaptive sync performance is Flawless and it mostly works as intended and prevents tearing LFC kicks in at 59 FPS and also does a good job though in some scenarios I can note is a faint flickering with adaptive sync and doesn't really show up in my usual stress test which is a bit weird but I do notice this and valorant and sometimes even on the desktop it's a faint flickering which really doesn't occur often and it isn't like super noticeable but this is something you should keep in mind if you're a big fan of adaptive sync and somewhat sensitive to flickering now when it comes to color saturation this new OLED panel isn't that different from our typical IPS or VA panel it's a white Gammon panel with roughly 1.4 times the color gimbal volume of srgpe and Adobe RGB and DCI P3 coverages around the 90 Mark really nothing out of the ordinary the factory calibration though is exceptionally bad this is not exactly a cheap monitor so I'd expect a much better Factory setup the srgb mode isn't that bad but there still isn't something I'd want to use without making adjustments luckily LG didn't block the RGB controls in the srg HP mode which is great to see so you can actually fix the white Point yourself after some adjustments the normal native gamut mode also becomes much better the high Delta e is somewhat expected as we're looking at a wide gamut monitor a full calibration gets rid of this issue though the maximum Delta e is a bit too high to consider this monitor for professional Color Work generally I don't think this monitor is optimal for Content creation as it also has a few other issues caused by its subpixel layout and sub pixels are arranged in an RW BG layout which is quite different from our ordinary RGB pixel and this causes visual artifacts that are especially noticeable with certain text and graphics with sharp edges like take a look at what happens when I highlight this text there's quite a heavy amount of red and green fringing going on yellow is probably the most difficult color for this panel so this is kind of a worst case scenario but this is something you're definitely gonna notice whenever there's something yellow with with a high contrast Edge the red and green subpixer with compose yellow are quite far apart in this layout so there will be red fringing on the left and green fringing on the right therefore I really cannot recommend this monitor for graphic design or even photo or video editing as I feel the color fringing is way too distracting I mean sure if you're editing like one photo a month as a hobby this really isn't a huge issue but I wouldn't recommend this monitor for more serious content creation for text I actually don't mind the pixel layout as much as I thought I would sure if all your text is highlighted in yellow it will look awful but black text on a white background can actually look really clean I definitely recommend using clear type but after a clear type run text and word is actually looking basically as good as with a regular RGB layout panel it doesn't really translate well over camera so I guess you have to trust me that the text clearly improved a lot with glitter type and looks really good unfortunately though clear tab doesn't apply to text in every program and Graphics aren't affected either so this doesn't get rid of the issue entirely why text on Gray background also doesn't look great so after all this isn't the very best experience when it comes to reading text the weird sub pixel layout mostly does not affect gaming or content consumption in rare cases like when you're using a yellow Crosshair you're gonna see fringing though but to be fair it's unlikely that this will keep you from hitting your headshots so I'd consider this a non-issue for gaming though there's a good chance that you'll dislike this Dent design if you're playing a lot of FPS games the stand is quite large side to side and the middle feet are placed in a way that I can totally see myself hitting it with my mouse at least the display is mounted near to the front so you can get it pretty close to you without getting overly close to your mouse also like the adjustment range of the stand the max height is actually very high which I find pretty useful tilt swivel and pivot are adjustable as well usually I'm not big fan of RGB lights on a monitor but in this case the light is decently bright and is actually quite useful as a biased light and if you're using a keyboard without a backlight I'm not sure though what to think about this remote sure it's nice that this monitor comes with a remote but a return LG got rid of any useful controls on the monitor I mean there is a single button on the bottom of the screen but this is not a directional toggle but an actual button you can change certain settings by performing a combination of short and long button presses but this honestly is just ridiculously cumbersome so you better don't lose the remote now anyway I think throughout this review it's become pretty clear that this monitor basically demolishes LCD monitors in certain areas I mean you're simply not gonna get these levels of contrast from an IPS or even a VA panel but in return you've got to accept a few drawbacks over a traditional LCDs in addition to the higher asking price obviously personally I find the color fringing that's caused by the subpixel layout rather annoying when browsing through the web and the Low Max brightness is a bit challenging on a sunny day this monitor met me using my window blinds a lot more than I wanted to in the evening though for watching videos or playing valorent the olymp panel is just amazing contrast is insane HDR looks great in a dark room and the response times are faster than anything else so yeah if that's what you do like using your monitor at evening or in a dimmed room for gaming and watching videos this is just an amazing monitor but if you're rather looking for something a bit more versatile I suggest watching my review of the aw2723df it has similar specs but if you're using your monitor in a bright room and also working a lot with textual Graphics a super bright IPS pill will make those things quite a bit easier even though it lacks the wow factor of the older panel thanks for watching with some Nissan video

Channel: techless

Views: 29,643

Keywords: oled gaming monitor, gaming monitor, oled, lg, LG 27GR95QE

Id: oh9tC3Ck0_Y

Length: 16min 0sec (960 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 14 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/tonyw009]

Glossy Finish?